in London
Manchester, Friday, 23 May 1862

I Mehr 23 May 62

Dear Mohr

The wine was delayed for the same reason as the letter. In these matters I have to attend to everything myself, & until the basket is bought etc. many interruptions occur. This time, too, I have had to forgo the port because it is at my lodgings & I could not get it sent to the warehouse. The basket goes off today. The red wine & the 1846 Hochheimer specially for Jennychen. The 3 bottles with red seals without labels are 1857 Rüdesheimer (the same we drank here) & too fiery for patients, but very good for healthy people.

Strohn was here (you see cela ne finit pas with the visits). He was in Berlin shortly before the dissolution, & caroused a great deal with the Rhenish deputies. The fellows took the whole position enormously seriously, believed in their omnipotence, & were again as thoroughly in the grip of parliamentary cretinism as almost ever in 1848. Red Becker, whose hair has in the meantime faded considerably, went about all day in evening dress, black from top to toe, & in tails. His belly fatter than ever. Also hanging about there was Herr Rudolf Schramm, late of Striegau, who complained to everyone prepared to listen that the public would vote for him nowhere, a thing that was beyond his comprehension. One evening Schr. talked colossal rubbish about England, whereupon Str. said to him: Listen, Herr Schramm, if I had been in England as long as you, I would be ashamed of spouting such balderdash; you seem to have slept the whole time there. To which the otherwise so impudent Schr. replied: You see, in England, on account of my wife, I had to go into society to which I was not suited, & the people I would gladly have seen I could not see, for the very same reason!!!

McClellan carries on in the familiar manner. The Confederates always give him the slip because he never goes for them, which he excuses by saying they are stronger, a good deal, than he is. That is also why they then keep running away. War has never yet been waged in this fashion, and for it he gets his vote of thanks. Meanwhile these little unfortunate rearguard actions and the continual bolting are nevertheless enough to demoralise the Confederates badly, & when it comes to the decisive battle they will feel that.

The capture of New Orleans is a feat of the fleet. Quite excellent, the passage of the forts, that is. After that everything was simple. The moral effect on the Confederates was evidently enormous, & the material one will already have made itself felt. Beauregard at Corinth now has nothing left to defend; the position had meaning only as long as it covered Mississippi & Louisiana, especially New Orleans. B. is strategically placed so that a lost battle leaves him no choice but to dissolve his army into guerrillas, for without a large town where railways and resources are concentrated, in the rear of his army, he cannot keep any masses together.

If the Confederate army in Virginia is beaten, it must, after the preceding demoralising affairs, soon dissolve of its own accord into guerrillas. To be sure, it has better chances, because on its line of retreat there are many rivers running across from the mountains to the sea, and because it has that ass M’Cl. opposite it; however, the nature of things will drive it either to accept a decisive battle or to dissolve into bands without a battle. Exactly as the Russians at Smolensk and Borodino had to fight, against the will of the generals who judged correctly.

If Beauregard or the army of Virginia wins a battle, however great, it will be of little help. The Confederates are not in a position to draw the slightest advantage from it. They cannot advance 20 English miles without getting stuck, & must, therefore, await the renewed attack. They lack everything. For the rest, I consider this case, without direct betrayal, to be quite impossible.

The fate of the Confederate armies, therefore, now hangs on a single battle; it only remains to examine the chances of the guerrilla war. Now, it is extremely remarkable, precisely in this war, how little, or rather how not at all, the population has taken part in it. In 1813, after all, the communications of the French were constantly interrupted and harassed by Colomb, Lützow, Czernyschew and twenty other freebooters and Cossack leaders; in 1812 the population in Russia completely disappeared from the French line of march; in 1814 the French peasants armed themselves and beat allied patrols and stragglers to death, but here nothing at all happens. People submit to the fate of great battles and console themselves with victrix causa Diis &c.

The bragging about war to the knife dissolves into pure filth. And are guerrillas to flourish on this terrain? To be sure, I expect that the white trash of the South will try something of the sort after the final dissolution of the armies, but I am too firmly convinced of the bourgeois nature of the planters to doubt for an instant that this will immediately make them furious Union men. Let them try that with brigandage, and the planters will everywhere receive the Yankees with open arms. The bonfires on the Mississippi are based exclusively on the 2 Kentuckians who are said to have come to Louisville—certainly not on the Mississippi. The fire in New Orleans was easily organised, and will be repeated in other towns; otherwise, too, much will certainly be burned, but the matter must necessarily drive to a head the split between the planters and merchants on the one hand and the white trash on the other, and with that secession is done for.

The fanaticism of the New Orleans merchants for the Confederacy is simply explained by the fact that the fellows have had to take a mass of Confederate scrip for ready money. I know several examples of this here. This should not be forgotten. A solid forced loan is a capital means of chaining the bourgeoisie to the revolution and of confounding their class interests through their personal interests.

Best greetings to your wife and the girls.

Your
F.E.

Lupus has again been labouring greatly under the gout. He is going to Germany in 5 weeks.

I You have, surely, read the business with Bernard, that they have put him into the madhouse. Is the story true, or is there foul play involved?